EA buys into Mythic..

[Cryn]

[quote="Xest"]when you get good managers with good ideas who beleive in good working practices you get places like Google, Pixar and such - places that just look damn fun to work ]

Google is not a fun place to work. At least not their UK operation.

Back on track, though, I didn't mention before, I'm not happy to see Mythic bought up by EA. In gaming I think the ideal for the players is a large number of relatively small concerns. While businesses benefit in many ways from getting bigger, creativity is rarely one of those ways.

[Xest]

Google is not a fun place to work. At least not their UK operation.

Back on track, though, I didn't mention before, I'm not happy to see Mythic bought up by EA. In gaming I think the ideal for the players is a large number of relatively small concerns. While businesses benefit in many ways from getting bigger, creativity is rarely one of those ways.

Well it depends which department if you work somewhere like Google ofc, I was referring to somewhere like R&D or Operations rather than Sales, which is largely like sales anywhere else - pretty boring

Lairiodd I know where you're coming from but there is another part to the story too, many devs stuck working 90hrs a week simply don't have time to find another job with those kind of hours, they can quit of course but if they have a family, which many do they put themselves in a position where they may not be able to feed their family, literally. Many also fear leaving be it because they're worried it may make them look bad, because they may not be able to get a reference from EA or what have you - in many cases in the game dev. world what Sanya said is true, certainly at Midway I saw no problems in terms of the trade off between a fun job and hours but again, when you're talking 90, hell even 70hrs a week getting out isn't terribly easy. The low pay also makes it worse in that circumstance because it's also not as if they're paid enough such that they can save up to just quit and support their family off the savings. This has been part the complaint about the way EA and some other companies do things - they trap young, eager people who join because they want to do game dev. and within a year turn them into captives who find it hard to get out until they eventually burn out and end up in the financial shit with major mental health problems to accompany it anyway.

[Quinlan]

hell I work overtime and don't get paid for it, it's just something you have to do sometime - because when it comes to promotion time it gets you a long way. I don't however work more than 45hrs a week (except on extremely rare occasions).

LOL

You call 45 hours a week working overtime...................

I work about 60 to 70 hours (or more) a week and am still able to enjoy life alot. Go out to dinner everynight and then to the bar or club. It is totally possible to look for a job if i would want too. Hell i am at work at the moment and probably will pop in tomorow. Only thing you have to be able to stand is 4 to 5 hours sleep a night. But I get all this overtime paid and i can tell you it is damn nice every month when you get around 80 hours overtime paid extra

Ofcourse i work in a hectic SAP implementation project but still calling 45 hours a week doing overtime is laughable.

[Thandruil]

when you're talking 90, hell even 70hrs a week getting out isn't terribly easy. The low pay also makes it worse in that circumstance because it's also not as if they're paid enough such that they can save up to just quit and support their family off the savings.

Sounds exactly like my work.... maybe EA is behind it as well....

[<ankh>]

LOL

You call 45 hours a week working overtime...................

I work about 60 to 70 hours (or more) a week and am still able to enjoy life alot. Go out to dinner everynight and then to the bar or club. It is totally possible to look for a job if i would want too. Hell i am at work at the moment and probably will pop in tomorow. Only thing you have to be able to stand is 4 to 5 hours sleep a night. But I get all this overtime paid and i can tell you it is damn nice every month when you get around 80 hours overtime paid extra

Ofcourse i work in a hectic SAP implementation project but still calling 45 hours a week doing overtime is laughable.

Kind of depends on your job. Some jobs are more easy than others to handle the overtime.

But I do agree, 45h/week isnt really much overtime...but imo you shouldnt have to work overtime at all. And if they expect you to work 60-70h/week then they really should concider to hire more people or else they will burn you out sooner or laters (once again, this depends on your work)

Edit: Btw...40h/week = 8h/day...if you work 60h/week thats kind of half a day you work. Add the 8h sleep that you should have (which hardly anyone I know ever get) and you got 4h left.....then add travel from and to work (which ofc can vary) and you dont have much time left. Ofcourse, the 12h/day was if you dont work weekends.

Edit2: Also, if you got wife and kids you do need to spend some time with them... (and thats the good part for Satyn and her lil one...cos when Danny is at work - Viggos father (the postman) is at home )

Edit3: I could argue that money isnt everything too, so imo even if you do get alot of cash from all the overtime - you miss alot at the same time. (Speaking from my own experience...working 10-13h shifts in a factory with heavy liftings and stressy work kind of ruined 2 relationships for me)
/Ankh

[Xest]

LOL

You call 45 hours a week working overtime...................

I work about 60 to 70 hours (or more) a week and am still able to enjoy life alot. Go out to dinner everynight and then to the bar or club. It is totally possible to look for a job if i would want too. Hell i am at work at the moment and probably will pop in tomorow. Only thing you have to be able to stand is 4 to 5 hours sleep a night. But I get all this overtime paid and i can tell you it is damn nice every month when you get around 80 hours overtime paid extra

Ofcourse i work in a hectic SAP implementation project but still calling 45 hours a week doing overtime is laughable.

Well a standard working hour week is 37hrs in the UK (worldwide it's 35 - 40hrs) so yes, 45hrs is defininetely classed as overtime seeing as it's equivalent to an extra day a week in working hours

Thing to remember also is that these people working 90hrs a week in game dev AREN'T getting any overtime and that's one of the core issues when coupled with low wages (Around $23k/pa average in the US for the junior developers caught in this trap).

Just a side note also, you mention 4 - 5hrs sleep a night, you do realise it's been well proven that getting that little sleep each night over long periods of time can lead to development of diabetes, obesity and depression amongst many other things ? To ensure good health you should get 8hrs a night, but ideally an absolute minimum of 6hrs a night as an average.

[Sharkith]

80 hour weeks are not fun no matter what job your doing and any company that sustains that kind of pressure on its employees is unethical in its practices. Its beyond any knid of 'norm' for any sector in Western capitalism and belongs in the dark ages. Its why in Europe there is the working time directive which albiet patchy at least sets the norm and companies that continually flout it can be taken to court.

US labour laws as well as their welfare system is a crying shame to them. You only need to look at their position at the bottom of the OECD nations in relation to all health indicators and you begin to realise that there might be something wrong. The US is one big illusion.

Xest is right on 80 hours a week in a system where welfare in some places has all but been abolished is the equivalent of a cage. All that for £18k a week which is well short of the UK average for one and you start to realise how big a leech that EA and other US companies are.

As for health and sleep there is conclusive evidence that 6 is a minimum people who live on less die around 10-15 years younger. All those complications are not pleasant and you can add into them things like stroke.

As for 45 hours - thats fairly standard for a working week and I would say once you start getting on average over 60 hour weeks that people start getting a bit frayed. Nice to think that we will soon all be paying EA to do this to people.

[Lieva]

There are other companys who do that yknow.
EA are just well known for it.
My own company have admitted there are people who work in it for loads of hours without getting overtime...theyre trying to stop it (they say) but failing miserably

[Xest]

There are other companys who do that yknow.
EA are just well known for it.
My own company have admitted there are people who work in it for loads of hours without getting overtime...theyre trying to stop it (they say) but failing miserably

I think there's a difference though Banana between long unpaid hours and the kind of labour EA push, to put it another way, the kind of labour EA are pushing out of their staff is roughly equivalent to working 7am to 8pm 7 days a week. If you take an average of maybe an hour travelling each day (30mins each way) and then maybe 30mins for washing etc., 8hrs for a good nights sleep, and maybe an hour for food throughout the day and you're left with 1 hour per day to yourself. Now, some of these people also have families, could you imagine being married with kids and only getting to spend about 7hours out of 168hours in a week with them? It's just not something that should happen anywhere, particularly in the developed world where things are meant to be better in terms of working practices and such.

As Sharkith (and I earlier) pointed out, there is a working limit in Europe of 48hrs per week, a company is outright breaking the law if their workers are working more than this on a regular basis with the only exception being the UK where we have an opt out scheme that does let you work longer if you really want to. I just stumbled across this: http://www.fedee.com/workinghours.shtml which is somewhat interesting, I was under the impression the 48hr limit was flat across the EU but apparently some countries have lower working limits, the French maximum working hour week is apparently only 43.4hrs!

We're somewhat lucky in Europe that we do have these safeguards in place, and again it's ironic, that a country like the US that often likes to gloat about how successful it is is actually the country that cares least about it's citizens in this respect, after all if a country has all the money in the world does it really matter if it's citizens are often unhealthy and unhappy?

[<ankh>]

Its kind of hard to expect good results from programmers who are halfdead when working too imo. If you let them work more normal workdays you might actually get better result too (or atleast if you dont burn them out the way EA do)

/Ankh